HFS+ issue using Ubuntu Gparted

[djgizmo]

Short story...

New 2TB drive. Need to split partition. Half HFS+, half NTFS
Trying to partition the HFS+ using gparted (w/ HFSprogs package installed), max HFS+ Partition size I can seem to achieve is about 630 GB. Anything above that I get an error "Partition size not a multiple of 4k"

Anyone have a solution ?

 

[Silhouette]

I think this is a problem/limitation of mkfs.hfsplus, so I guess it won't help if you try to use that directly?

I guess you've made sure that the problem is with the size of the partition and not actually that the partition size isn't a multiple of 4k?

Have you tried a different partition table (GUID vs MBR) if compatible with your Windows version?

Can you create the HFS+ partition by connecting it to a mac and doing it in OS X?

 

[djgizmo]

Yep, tried to use multiples of 4k, but of course, that fails anything above 635GB.
Using Gparted, I made sure the drive was using GUID (GPT) and same issue.

Seems that this limitation is also in diskpart in Windows 7 as well.

I do not have access to a Mac or even Hackintosh OSX disc (or I would have already formatted from home)

I did find a solution though.

As of the latest update with Mac Drive 8, (8.0.4.10), one can not only format entire disks to HFS+ (even journaled), but individual partitions. (This is something NEW as it was NOT in the previous update (8.0.3) as I tried it before)

What I did was formatted the partition as NTFS first within Computer Management, then went to Mac Drive and clicked on Modify/Format Mac Disks... then clicked on the drive, then clicked on the partition on the drive I wanted, and the option to Initialize Volume becomes available. Bingo

Hope this helps other Windows users that have large drives that want/need to format HFS+ drives larger than 635GB.